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Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

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Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#131
post #2

I commend you for hand rolling it all and not using JS. I miss the days of good ole forum software (e.g. FluxBB/PunBB) before it was superseded with massive JS bloat/clunky forum software like Discourse, Flarum, etc.

Ohh I miss the good old days of forums in general. I find all this new software, where conversions* are "threaded" stupidly hard to read. Even worse, when the software is trying to recommend to you, what to read. Back in the day you had a thread, every post to that thread was chronologically added to that thread and in case you wanted to reply to someone, you quoted them... sigh EDITED: *conversations

My favorite kind of web forum engine is the one which keeps discussions threaded, but displays them in a flat list of messages ordered by time, but with quick navigation to parent and responses.

Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#132
post #124

It's always nice to hear about someone writing a cool program just because they felt like doing so. Every time I think about writing a forum server, I find I return to the thought that Usenet was better, and that if I wanted a web forum, I'd consider putting a web front end on an NNTP server. That would among other things let people keep using NNTP clients (I like gnus.el) if they don't want to use a browser. There a…

Every now and then I'm reminded of what could have been when someone submitted a patch to Dreamwidth (probably easily ported to Livejournal) that provided a bi-directional NNTP gateway that allowed posting. The Dreamwidth devs quite reasonably ended up regretfully rejecting it because there was no-one in the dev community who could maintain it, but sometimes when I'm reading through a community that generates 5000 me…

The most productive workplace forum I have used was based on NNTP. So much better than "improvements" like Slack and Discourse. But then I considered it was really just a shared email. Would email with shared folders not achieve the same?

Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#133
post #124

It's always nice to hear about someone writing a cool program just because they felt like doing so. Every time I think about writing a forum server, I find I return to the thought that Usenet was better, and that if I wanted a web forum, I'd consider putting a web front end on an NNTP server. That would among other things let people keep using NNTP clients (I like gnus.el) if they don't want to use a browser. There a…

Every now and then I'm reminded of what could have been when someone submitted a patch to Dreamwidth (probably easily ported to Livejournal) that provided a bi-directional NNTP gateway that allowed posting. The Dreamwidth devs quite reasonably ended up regretfully rejecting it because there was no-one in the dev community who could maintain it, but sometimes when I'm reading through a community that generates 5000 me…

The D Language forum is a web forum/NNTP client/mail archive/irc bot/rss feed. You don't have to make an account to post. A friend of mine pointed out many years ago that it was basically the peak form of multi-protocol communications. If someone could implement convenient encryption it would be magic.

Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#134
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terrible user experience. If it infinitely scrolls I can be sure some gesture on the phone will lose my spot and it will take ages to find where I was. Also they rarely play nice with the back button. There is usually a better way to present data. For reading, do you prefer books or ancient scrolls?

Apollo (reddit client on iOS) solves this by having the same gesture undo itself -- tap at the top to scroll to the top of the reddit post, tap again to return to where you were. I'm not saying your complaint is invalid, just that there are ways of mitigating the issue. And that said, I can't imagine how reddit threads would work if paginated.

Yeah but how many people will discover that functionality themselves vs how much effort will you expend trying to educate the rest of your users? Pagination wins because there's nothing to learn, it's obvious where you are and how to get somewhere else.

Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#135
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I actually believe vBulletin 3 is where it’s at! Curious, what about vBulletin v4 and v5 do you not like?

Developers of vB 3 left the company and started new forum software named XenForo. They were then sued by Internet Brands (vB owners) for IP theft - IB claimed XenForo was next vBulletin. In court hearings we’ve learned that IB plan for vBulletin development was to fire all but lead dev, and have this lead dev only delegate and review work to outsourced devs in Asia. We’ve also heard that „only developers care about q…

I wondered why vbulletin v4+ seemed like such a radical shift. vB 3.x was a true platform. There was a rich ecosystem of plugins (including many paid) and many sites were heavily customized. Every vB 4+ site looks exactly the same to me IMHO. This also explains why all of the paid plugins moved to XenForo. Interesting...

Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just, like, your opinion man. I prefer HN's indented approach to a typical forum listing where it's just a firehose with quotes. But the best approach is to allow the view to be switched as desired.

The problem with letting users choose the view is that the chosen view affects how they write. If I can see it's obvious in my tree view who I'm responding to, I won't point it out, and then someone who uses the firehose view won't be able to follow the conversation.

I feel the main problem wouldn't be this (if you handle quotes to show in a tree view then surely you can handle replies in a tree view to show quotes in a firehose).

However, the main issue is that when you can quote multiple comments (when you are in a firehose view) you tend to send a single post for multiple replies; I have no idea how that could be shown in the tree view.

Essentially a firehose is a superset of a tree structure, if your unit is a post.

Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#138
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every now and then I'm reminded of what could have been when someone submitted a patch to Dreamwidth (probably easily ported to Livejournal) that provided a bi-directional NNTP gateway that allowed posting. The Dreamwidth devs quite reasonably ended up regretfully rejecting it because there was no-one in the dev community who could maintain it, but sometimes when I'm reading through a community that generates 5000 me…

The D Language forum is a web forum/NNTP client/mail archive/irc bot/rss feed. You don't have to make an account to post. A friend of mine pointed out many years ago that it was basically the peak form of multi-protocol communications. If someone could implement convenient encryption it would be magic.

https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#139

This is great. I want to see more of the web to be like this. Simple, direct, light, and functional. I've came to learn on this thread alone that other projects such as teddit and nitter exist, which capture this same spirit. I'd like to know if other projects for popular sites exist as well. Someone should make an aggregation of sites and open source libraries like https://github.com/Demindiro/agreper that exist.

bearblog & prose.sh came to mind (minimal blog system). For chat, we got https://github.com/altilunium/darkhallv3

Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#140
post #102
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made a reddit-like comment system for HN if you are curious: https://www.hackernewz.com/item/33153152 (link to your comment: https://www.hackernewz.com/item/33153152?commentId=33155112 )

The style is very neat. Mind sharing the source ?

Yes, I will post it on HN and Github as soon as it's finished!
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